It's been pretty quiet here so I haven't had much cause to write, you know how it is.

Jamie's at her second swimming lesson. The first one last week was a bit of a drama, she fell over and scraped her elbow and knee nastily just before she got on the coach. The whole thing
seems very poorly organised. Carmen has gone in the car today so she can bring her home straight afterwards. There's no waiting area so they're dumped outside to wait for the coach with wet hair and everything, so one shudders to think how many catch colds when it's wet or rainy. There's one coach for two coachloads of children, and Jamie is in the second one, so she would be left in the cold. I'm not sure if Carmen's going to keep it up going there every Friday -
there's no viewing area and parents are only allowed in to the pool to watch once a month, so the mums have to kill time during the lesson. Coffee and natter, I guess.

But it's good for Jamie to get some lessons, she's a natural swimmer but needs some proper teaching. Also they start early in Holland and we don't want her to be lagging behind next year. Frank passed his certificate recently, swimming fully clothed, so you see they are pretty advanced there.

Danny is enjoying school, they have a nap there in the afternoons, he has his own cushion and blanket and they have a mat in the corner they all lie on. He seems to nap there better than he does / did at home! He has always been a loner in the playground unless Jamie's been there, in which case he's played with her or her friends, but since he's started school he's started slowly to come out of his shell a bit. At least he tries talking to other kids, but he doesn't jump in to their games like Jamie did at his age.

He's got a slight cold at the mo, his winter permasnot has started and he was coughing and sneezing a lot first thing this morning. He's lasted well today though, considering.

We took the car in for a service and to have them look at our clutch, which kept slipping during acceleration on the journey to and from Holland. They've spotted an oil leak onto the clutch, but they're wondering if it's a design fault of the car and have phoned 'Madrid', who want to have a look at it, so it's going away for a couple of days. Whatever happens, it's under guarantee.

Not a lot happening on the Holland front, we need Nuria to come and take some more photos of this flat. They're on the market at Nuria's agency, there have been some people interested in the 2nd flat but as there are people renting at the mo we haven't been able to show it to anyone. We are also waiting to hear from our accountant about the exact tax consequences, but he's in the middle of quarter-end and will get back to us once that's finished, i.e. any day now I hope.

The chap who designed the website for the rental flat is going to make a new site for selling the flats, and I will promote them on selling sites at some point soon. The prices here are driven by the proximity to Bilbao and are not very attractive to the average Brit - 100 miles to the west you can buy a renovated 5-bed detached house with garage, land and views, 5 minutes from the beach, for the same price as we are asking for this place. So we need to think of a strategy, ways of targetting the Basque market rather than the Brit market which I personally would be more comfortable selling to, language wise at least.

I had an appointment this week for a specialist to look at my knee, which had been made in June. My knee is a lot better, but I still get the odd little twinge so I thought might as well go to the appointment. I guessed they would do a scan or x-ray or something, but he just felt it and bent my leg in different directions, then said they would phone me with an appointment for a scan. Hmmm, all that wait and a trip to Torrelavega for that? Not sure if I'll bother with the scan.

Actually it was TWO trips to Torrelavega, as I got the dates mixed up and turned up a day early... ahum... The silver lining was we got to do some shopping - there's been a local transport strike, which had just turned national, and a lot of things were disappearing from the
shelves, so we stocked up on fresh fruit, veg and meat. As it was they called off the strike the next day, but we had some peace of mind having stocked up.